When Peyton Gillespie began working on a research project through Ball State University’s Teacher-Scholar Program, she didn’t expect to find herself immersed in some of the most emotionally intense and policy-relevant criminal justice work happening on campus. Alongside Dr. Indigo Koslicki, a professor of criminal justice and an expert in policing, Gillespie helped create one of the most comprehensive datasets ever compiled on fatal police pursuits in the United States.

“There’s no national reporting system for police-involved deaths—nothing you can just download from the Department of Justice,” Dr. Koslicki explains. “So we built it ourselves.”

In an era where public scrutiny of policing practices continues to grow, a new research article submitted for peer review, composed by Dr. Indigo Koslicki and student researcher Peyton Gillespie, offers a timely and essential contribution to the conversation surrounding law enforcement vehicle pursuits. Together, they are challenging assumptions, identifying dangerous patterns, and advocating for data-driven policy reform.

The Problem: Chases That Kill

Police pursuits are often dramatized in media- compelling, fast-paced, and prolific. But behind the scenes, they frequently end in tragedy. The study, Fatal Outcomes of Police Pursuits, provides a comprehensive national analysis of 2,033 police pursuit-related fatalities in the United States from 2019 to 2021. According to the research, over 2,000 individuals died in police pursuits, and a shocking number of these deaths involved people who weren’t even driving the car, including passengers, pedestrians, or bystanders.

“Some of the most heartbreaking cases were kids, elderly folks, or completely uninvolved civilians,” noted Gillespie. “And in many cases, the original reason for the chase was something as minor as a traffic violation.”

Their statistical analysis reveals that lower-level offenses such as misdemeanors are significantly more likely to result in passenger fatalities, suggesting that police may pursue even minor infractions with disproportionately deadly consequences for non-suspects.

The Research: Building the Nation’s First Comprehensive Database On Fatal Police Pursuits

Because the federal government does not mandate that police departments report fatal pursuits, Gillespie and Koslicki had to draw from multiple sources, including crowdsourced databases, government data, and news archives or obituaries, in some cases.

“I had to read every case. It was overwhelming. Every row in that spreadsheet represents a person who died. It changes how you see the world,” shared Gillespie.

Gillespie used news archives to verify the victims’ identities of fatal police pursuits and compared the variables in each case to data from Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Gillespie was able to analyze these cases and identify whether the victim was a driver, passenger, or bystander.

What They Found: Disproportion and Disregard

One of the team’s key findings is that low-level offenses, like traffic citations or suspected misdemeanors, are disproportionately likely to end in fatal outcomes for passengers.  The research also reveals significant racial disparities. Black and Latino individuals were significantly more likely to die as passengers than as drivers or pedestrians. Furthermore, Latino victims were almost twice as likely to be pedestrians killed during a pursuit.

Their first peer-reviewed paper, currently under revision, examines whether the nature of the suspected crime influences who dies in a pursuit. The results are sobering. These findings highlight a troubling pattern: people of color are disproportionately the collateral damage in police vehicle pursuits.

There is some scholarly argument to not record race when compiling across crowdsourced databases, since sometimes officers mistake a driver’s race. However, “even when race isn’t clearly known, colorism plays a role,” Dr. Koslicki notes, “Police often make decisions based on visual cues that have real-world consequences.” This database, therefore, collects race as reported by officers to draw attention to the systemic disparities that still exist in many police practices.

The research findings, which will be submitted as a second manuscript to Criminology, a highly ranked journal in the field, also support broader theories in criminology, including the racial threat hypothesis, which suggests that racial and ethnic minorities face disproportionate state control in predominantly white areas, especially when their population is growing.

Policy Gaps: A Call for Transparency

Despite the danger and frequency of pursuits, many local agencies lack formal policies or keep them vague. Gillespie, Dr. Koslicki, and another Teacher-Scholar student, Autumn Taylor, submitted numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, but most were overlooked.

“That’s a big issue, too. A lot of researchers and members of the public don’t even know if their local law enforcement agency has a policy or not, because they’re not transparent, and we do have open records requests that you can do, but a lot of times, they just get ignored,” explained Dr. Koslicki.

Autumn Taylor presented research in the 2024 Student Symposium that showed that only 12.5% of public records requests were actually answered by law enforcement agencies involved in fatal pursuits.

Their research aims to advocate for a national, mandatory reporting system for all pursuit-related incidents, fatal or otherwise. They also note the lack of a national standard for body camera use and the wide variation in when and how footage is recorded or released, which causes inconsistent or incomplete data records.

Real-World Impact: Local Action, National Implications

Behind the numbers are names, and that weight isn’t lost on the researchers. “Every case is a person. Every person has a network mourning them,” Dr. Koslicki reflected.

Gillespie and Koslicki aim to utilize their research to inspire local change, beginning with the Muncie Police Department, where two fatal pursuits occurred during the time of this research study. Their research advocates for the use of non-lethal alternatives such as GPS tagging, license plate readers, and automatic citation systems.

“This is low-hanging fruit,” says Dr. Koslicki, “We have GPS trackers, license plate readers, and drone technology. Pursuits aren’t always necessary.”

They plan to present their findings to local leaders and advocate for new policies aligned with Department of Justice recommendations, which limit chases to violent felony suspects only. Additionally, the study urges law enforcement to end pretextual traffic stops and implement racially unbiased policies to curb the over-policing of marginalized communities.

The Human Cost of Data

Beyond the numbers, the emotional toll on the researchers is significant. “I had to find hobbies outside criminal justice,” Gillespie admits. “It’s heavy. Sometimes it’s really demoralizing. You open this massive spreadsheet, and every line is someone who’s dead.”

Still, the work has inspired her to pursue a career in criminal justice research. She’s now an intern at the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute and hopes to continue working on justice-focused data projects.

 “I’m going to admit, when I signed up for the Teacher-Scholar program, it wasn’t because I wanted to do research. It was to add that to my resume for grad school, but at some point, I fell in love with it,” said Gillespie. She’s currently planning to work for a federal research agency to begin making changes at the federal level.

What’s Next: From Pursuits to Policy Reform

Beyond publishing, the team hopes to eventually release the cleaned dataset to the public, empowering journalists, advocates, and other scholars. “If our government won’t be transparent, then it’s up to researchers to make these truths visible,” Dr. Koslicki said.

They are also eyeing new projects that explore the intersection of race, neighborhood context, and police decision-making, with future papers focusing on the post-George Floyd movement and the influence of racial threat dynamics.

The research doesn’t stop here. Gillespie and Koslicki are already working on a second paper exploring how racial demographics and neighborhood conditions influence pursuit outcomes. They also hope to provide the Muncie Police Department with their cleaned dataset to inspire policy change.

“We hope to present our findings to Muncie Police and push for reform—start small and local, and work outward,” Gillespie added.

Want to learn more or support this research? Contact Dr. Indigo Koslicki at wkoslicki@bsu.edu or visit Ball State’s Teacher-Scholar Program to learn about how our university empowers undergraduate students to engage in faculty-led research that makes a true difference.